Religion, Race And Double Standards

Imagine for a moment that Barack Obama had never attended Jeremiah Wright's church in Chicago and had decided to attend services, and proselytize for, a black separatist, nationalist church that refused to allow whites to participate in crucial religious services because white people had been condemned by God for their iniquity in the ancient past and had been for ever marked white so black Americans would know instantly to keep their distance. In fact, the definition of white in this black supremacist church was just one drop of white blood in a black person. It was Nazi-like in its racist precision and exclusion. Whites were denied the rites that made a person a full member of the church. Even blacks with a tiny strain of white DNA were kept from full participation.

Imagine further that backing this racist church was not a youthful folly on Obama's part, but a profound commitment - that he went on a mission abroad to convert Christians to a new religion based on black racial supremacy, and has often said that the most important thing in his entire life to this day is a church whose sacred scripture declares white people to be cursed by God for their past sins - and the sign of this curse is their white skin.

A simple question: Do you think this issue would not come up in a general election or a primary? If Obama was subjected to news cycle after news cycle of clips of Obama's actual former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, can you imagine the outrage if Obama had actually been a part of a black supremacist church - that denied whites equal access to the sacraments - for over a decade in his adult life?

I raise this because it is a fact that Mitt Romney belonged to a white supremacist church for 31 years of his life, went on a mission to convert Christians and Jews and others to this church, which retained white supremacy as a doctrine until 1978 - decades after Brown vs Board of Education, and a decade after the end of the anti-miscegenation laws.

1. The upcoming election isn't just a chance to thank those neatly groomed young men

for getting you out of the shower. It's a chance to repudiate a long nasty racial prejudice which was just very recently, in a historical context, relaxed for what appear to be very ulterior motives.

Mormons will explain that the church needed to expand its membership to improve its football chances, but the truth is more that they needed to expand their membership to maintain their elegibility to obtain federal funds.

The new view of Mormon officialdom is in some ways more offensive than the old. The new claim is that blacks have evolved sufficiently in the intervening hundred or so years to have earned the privilege of the priesthood. Not, and I emphasize, not that the church was ever wrong.